Virtual teams
'Introduction' A virtual team, also known as geographically dispersed teams, is a relatively new model that was first introduced in the early 1990s when the Internet gradually found broad acceptance. It is a group of individuals who temporarily work together on a global task. The individuals collaborate virtually and are primarily dispersed by organization structure and different time zones which allow them to be more efficient in information sharing and saving working time.1 This team structure was made possible with the evolution of telecommunication technology and implementation of the World Wide Web.2 The bottom line of virtual teams in practice is its flexibility. By using software to delegate information between different team members, it is enabled that companies speed up the information process and work more as a decentralized structured organization.3 'Concept of virtual teams' Mostly, the concept of virtual teams is possible through technological systems such as electronic communication which make the interaction possible without meeting a person in the traditional face-to-face way. Usually, virtual teams are organized in small numbers of people involved. In fact, the bigger the team, the more chaotic and unmanageable it may become. Even though virtual teams are only able to work due to advancement in technology, some researchers still say that successful virtual teams are made of “90 percent people and 10 percent technology”.4 '' '' 'Characteristics' Virtual teams mainly have two characteristics that make them special and distinguish them from established, traditional teams. Firstly, spatial space and secondly, the way of communication. Regular teams usually are located in the some building, whereas virtual teams are all over the world. Furthermore, traditional teams have the possibility to share information in meetings or discussions that are conducted face-to-face. In contrast to this, virtual teams use emails, phone calls and videoconferences.5 'Configuration' The concept is built around three factors: purpose, people and links · Purpose: Achieving the set purpose is the main goal of every organization. It is therefore crucial to define the shared purpose at the very beginning because it holds the teams together. Purpose requires goal setting, interdependent tasks and common results. · People: In virtual teams everything is built on people, even though telecommunication is the key word. They must be able to work independently and autonomously but always remember the team notion. Another key aspect is shared leadership. During the project, leadership will shift from one person to another depending on where the team is in the process. This means that everyone brings a specific skill into the project and will be needed all along the team work and as a leader during the special task at hand.6 · Links: People must be linked together, either through face-to-face communication or through communication technologies. Interaction is crucial in order that these links actually work. In order to be able to work in such an atypical environment, managers should therefore first of all equip their teams with comprehensive communication skills. It is absolutely necessary for group members to know how to interact with other members in order to stay part of this team and letting other feel part of it as well. Different communication devices may be used for different situations and phases during a project. For example, emailing can be used for weekly or monthly reports whereas virtual chat rooms may be used to rather discuss issues on projects.7 Scheduling is very important while working in a virtual team, people have to be reliable and must be able to be trusted. Managers should therefore strongly encourage people to participate in meetings. If possible, putting a face to an email is always nice and should be done. Unfortunately this is the main issue for virtual teams, so mostly, there is no human contact at all. 8 Managers should really beware to communicate with every one of the team by asking questions (rather ask one question too much instead of one not enough). If not, people tend to lose motivation and rather focus on own or other projects.9 'Advantages ' The most important advantage of virtual teams is the enhancement in productivity and shorter development times.10 The highest productivity gains are reached when a company’s infrastructure such as IT is modern, flexible and configurable. By having virtual teams, companies can benefit from the so-called “Follow the sun” approach. By considering time zone differences, it is is possible that employees are able to work on projects all day long and permanently.11 When using the concept of virtual teams, diverse located experts are able to work collaboratively.12 Nowadays, using the approach of home offices becomes more and more popular. By installing virtual teams, a high degree of cohesion is offered.13 This makes a permanent presence of employees obsolete. Virtual teams rely on modern technology and this may attract better educated and more motivated employees and eventually lead to a competitive advantage.14 Travel costs are reduced 15 as well as the time-to-market of software or projects.16 According to an empirical study of multinational companies in 2010, the correct and full integration of virtual teams into the work environment, enables a high rate of project success of about 60 percent.17 'Disadvantages' Unfortunately, virtual teams have a negative side that needs to be considered prior establishment. The most important disadvantages of virtual teams are the lack of physical interaction and the resulting synergies that derive from face-to-face communication.18 According to a study, almost three out of four persons confirm that virtual teams make it difficult to manage conflicts or make consistent decisions. It is stated that the greatest general hurdle in working in virtual teams are time zones and public holidays that vary from country to country.19 While being an active member of a virtual team, trust plays an important role in the cooperation in the project. Virtual teams that show a high and sustainable trust, are significantly more productive than teams with low levels of trust.20 Due to both cultural and functional diversity, members dispose of different thought processes and tackle tasks differently.21 Additional negative factors regarding to virtual teams are mistrust, communication break downs, conflicts and eventually power struggles that lead to bad results of virtual teams.22 'Development of virtual teams' The early predecessors and pioneers of virtual teams were the so-called virtual freelancers in the early 1980’s. Virtual freelancers were people that were not required to have physical presence at the work place in the company. Often, these freelancers were part of the workforce that did not work at traditional office hours and did not have an own office because of family reasons or other personal limitations. In the early beginning, this was considered as a win-win situation. The freelancer gained an increased flexibility and the employer saved money by a reduced office infrastructure such as offices and tools. This form of relationship between employer and employee laid the foundation for further concepts of virtual teams.23 Research within the last decades has observed the use of virtuality for team work and how new technical innovations influenced the team performance. They have noted that virtual teams tend to have a shorter lifecycle than face-to-face teams, which has an influence on the performance levels and decision-making processes. The outcome of empirical studies showed how richer media is supporting collaboration within team members. In contrast, the use of new technologies is also the reason for new challenges, which the virtual teams have to overcome.24 'Challenges' 'Management of team challenges' The main challenge of virtual teams is the performance management. To assure sufficient performance, managers have to be aware of three main issues. Firstly, they have to define the performance. This means that all team members should understand their responsibilities. Questions that might be asked by managers are: * What is the team’s overall objective? * Do you expect each team member to fulfil more than one role on the team? * Which responsibilities will team members share? * Will the team elect a leader and what responsibilities will this person have? * Who is responsible for disciplinary action if the need arises? In addition to the performance definition, one has to develop specific goals so that workers and managers can stay focused on what really counts. They should be able to determine middle steps in order to follow the plan. This is crucial for the team’s harmony. Knowing that other members follow the plan, helps staying on the right track. Furthermore, this makes members staying positively tempered. Secondly, they should facilitate performance by helping team members to reach the requirements. Managers should therefore provide and equip his or her team with the latest technology and equipment. Logically, employers appreciate the fact that they can work with the best available devices. This minimizes delays in receiving critical data. Thirdly, managers should encourage performance and reward them accordingly. Different rewards exist and managers should custom these rewards for everyone differently. For instance, some employees prefer a higher salary whereas other prefer more leisure time. No matter what type of reward, they should fit the person and give them recognition and respect.25 'Technical challenges' The usage of chat facilities, E-mail communication and video conferences is labeled as lean. If virtual teams do not consider occurring incapabilities of the transfer of rich and relevant information, this could lead to a high level of uncertainty and a decrease of trust among the members, especially in the case of intercultural differences. There have been many complaints on occurring problems in the development of virtual teams: *It takes a lot of time to get things done *The work gets disrupted by incontrollable events and *It is difficult to stay connected Still, the companies rely on state-of-the-art technologies and on adopting them into their business. The companies believe that technologies will help them succeed. They are looking for any new tool that might help them to collaborate more effectively across the dimensions of distance and time.26 'Organizational challenges' The internet and new media technologies pursued the organizations and companies to work together. It also changed the development of virtual teams within the last years. It is constrained by the complexity of working across multiple contexts, making it more difﬁcult for team members to perform well. The final goal of virtual teams is to achieve organizational maturation and challenging cultural obstacles at the same time. The teams have to be aware of specific factors, which influence the team development. Especially in an intercultural context the team members should consider the formation of the counterpart, which means the team structure, the characteristics of each team member and also the hierarchy within the team. Furthermore, different working methods, which have an impact on the quality and the speed of interaction, can occur in intercultural collaborations. 'Impact of cultural differences in virtual teams' Ideally, diversity in culture should be seen as a matter of course and not a high barrier for team work in companies. Still, often it influences the overall team’s performance negatively because it is not seen as a rich and great advantage and rather as a burden in performing. Achieving benefits in virtual teams is possible by understanding and managing cultural differences properly.27 Individuals from different cultures always vary in their communication and in their behaviour towards other people. One dimension that has an influence on the effectivity and results of virtual teams is individualism-collectivism of the renowned Hofstede model.28 In individualistic cultures, people are less concerned with self-categorization, they are rather stubborn and pay attention on their own well-being and are more likely to leave existing virtual groups. In contrast to this, in collectivistic cultures, the needs, values and goals of the group take precedence over the ones of individual cultures.29 Employees from the US, the UK und the Netherlands are very individualistic. Examples for collectivistic employees are Ecuadorians, South Koreans and Chinese.30 In general, individuals from collectivistic cultures tend to fit better into virtual groups, which usually consist of people from all over the world. When different cultures interact with each other in virtual teams, this may lead to misunderstandings. Another dimension that needs to be considered is the differences between low- and high context cultures. In fact, these can strongly vary from one country to another. These differences of perception can lead to great misunderstandings and errors.31 Every culture consists of different norms and values and due to the fact that in virtual teams, no real face-to-face communication is possible. The cultural factor plays an important role. In order to bring harmony into a virtual team, it is important to select a team leader who is responsible for managing the cultural differences in virtual teams and is also aware of the differences in cultures and the effect it might have on the overall performance.32 Before using dispersed teams, one must first of all understand the different cultures which are represented in the team. Some might assume that the language itself is the most difficult task to overcome but others say that it is actually the culture. By understanding the team member’s individual culture, the company using the virtual team concept, will also benefit from understanding customer’s needs better. A main issue to overcome intercultural hurdles is finding the right balance between verbal and non verbal communication. While verbal communication is usually something that is similar from one language to another, non verbal communication differs greatly from one culture to the other.33 'Practice examples' Since the expansion of the World Wide Web, the speed of information has grown rapidly. The explanation is rather intuitive – source nodes are connected to other nodes and create a network which shares information faster than ever before. As a result companies are now using virtual teams to create different source nodes within the companies. It is usually made by different software.34 According to Reynolds virtual teams have grown by 79% within the recent years and that doesn’t count self-employed people who work from home.35 A practical example of a company who is using virtual teams as part of a greater network is Dell. 'Dell' Dell is a private global computer technology firm with more than one hundred thousand employees all over the world. As a part of the expansion by the intra-net demand of increased flexibility for employees, who are a part of running projects, have made virtual team become a major factor of success. Dell’s culture within the company is based on the philosophy “Connected workplace”. The firm’s strive is to offer employees remote work control, flexible time and part-time work. With help of the philosophy it has made the firm more decentralized due to virtual teams.36 Dell itself describes the virtual teams as formidable effectively. All needed teams are set-up by help of clusters within a network. The software which is used is called HR-direct and integrating the members of a team to easily share information between each other. Eventually, the used software realizes enormous time savings and makes the firm more flexible and decentralized. The integration enables virtual teams at Dell to perform fully reports in less than 30 days compared to two months before the integration. Another major advantage of using the HR-direct is that every member of the different team can access material and information from anywhere around the world.37 'Mozilla' Another organization that makes use of virtual teams is Mozilla. Mozilla is the creator of Mozilla Firefox, an open and free web browser. It is a nonprofit organization with employees in more than 30 different countries. Since they have 13 offices all around the world virtual teams are important and an essential asset. The virtual teams consist of managers and members from various parts of the community. The process of recruiting managers regarding the virtual team is different from a regular process. Mozilla’s philosophy is based on meritocracy which means that managers and leadership should be chosen for the superior abilities rather than wealth or social origin. Choosing a manager is more dependent of how active individuals in the community are and the quality of his or her contribution to the organization. Since the members of these different teams have never met before, this approach makes it effective to setup virtual teams within the organization.38 'Future 'predictions The current research is not sure what the future direction of virtual teams will look like. Researchers are just beginning to understand the function of virtual teams and how much work remains to be done to design and manage such teams. In particular, the yet limited findings on intercultural diversity holds great promises for future observations. More open questions, which outcome can be useful to understand the character and the implications of virtual teams, are the following: * How do sub-groups affect the development of virtual teams? * How does the team size have an impact? * How and to what extent should leaders define team roles? * How helpful is previous experience in virtual groups?39 ' ' 'References' ---- 1 Vlaar, P. (2008). Co Creating Understanding And Value In Distributed Work. MIS Quarterly, 32, 227-255. Deborah L. Duarte & Nancy Tennant Snyder (2011). Mastering virtual teams: strategies, tools, and techniques that succeed. 3 Flexjobs.com. 2014. 26 virtual companies that thrive on remote work. ONLINE Available at: http://www.flexjobs.com/blog./post/26-virtual-companies-that-thrive-on-remote-work/. Retrieved 28. November 2014. 4 Emerald Insight, Strategy & Leadership, Virtual teams: The new way to work, p. 17. 5 Hunsaker, P. & Hunsaker, J. 2008. Virtual teams: a leader’s guide. 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